I'm considering setting up a software-based iSCSI environment for some development/test VMs. Some of the research that I've done has lead me to StarWind's Free iSCSI product.
I was all happy since it seemed to fit my needs nicely (remember, this isn't a production setup) and was starting to install it last night.
However, I've read more than a few posts today talking about StarWind that seemed to be frank, quite spammy. This is leading me to question some of my initial research.
Is anyone actually using the StarWind Free or enterprise products? What have your experiences been, and would you recommend a similar solution for a test or development environment? (ie, probably at most two servers consuming the iSCSI targets..)
(I can provide more info about my intended usage scenarios, but I just wanted to get some high-level opinions of StarWind before I got much further...also, note that a hardware-based solution isn't an option due to budget..)
Actually I'm little confused by you're saying about "spammy". My experience will say nothing, I suppose, but thousands of users are continue to work with our production, but it seems like there are any of them on SF, unfortunatelly. All I can suggest you is to try trial version, and our support will help you in any case.
Regars.
We have been using the Starwind Enterprise target for a couple of months now. It's quite robust and speed on 1Gbps non jumbo is faster than local SATA 2 hard drive for small (<4GB) file copies (it seems that the target does a lot of caching - target drives are also SATA 2). So, we're impressed and I would definitely recommend the free or Starwind Standard version.